It was on still another day that Fortunato led through olive groves and bowery lanes to the temple of Juno Lacina, beguiling the way with light songs—some of them distinctly light—and scintillating conversation upon all matters in the heavens above, the earth beneath, and the waters under the earth. He mimicked deliciously the characteristics of English, French, German, and American tourists, differentiating their national peculiarities with delicate acuity. He made no effort to disguise that he had pondered much upon the sexes, and opined, with a shrug, that there was a hopeless and lifelong irreconcilability in their two points of view. Marriage, he frankly conceded to be a necessity, but considered it a lamentable one. Of course one must come to it soon or late, but, for a man, how sad a fate! Then he broke off to sing of undying passion, and interrupted himself to ask if the donkeys in Nuova Yorka were as quick and strong as those of Sicily; he supposed the streets must be crowded with them, where the needs of commerce were so great. Eventually he brought them out upon the lovely eminence of the temple of the Mother of Heaven—Juno 213Lacina, special deity of mothers, which crowns the edge of a sheer cliff of orange-yellow tufa four hundred feet above the sea. The sea had washed close under the cliff when the temple was first built, but now at its foot the alluvial plains stretch level and rich, bearing orchards and meadows and vineyards more fertile than any old Akragas knew, though this very shrine was built from the proceeds of exportation of oil to Carthage. Earthquakes had shaken down more than half the tall, slim columns. Sirocco has bitten deep into those still standing, and into the fallen fragments which strew the landward slope; fragments lying among gnarled olives, seemingly as wind-eaten and ancient as themselves. Among these fluted fragments grew wild pansies and crimson lupins, from which little Fortunato gathered nosegays, as he shrilled, in his boyish falsetto, songs of love and sorrow—or sat and kicked his heels upon the margin of an old bottle-shaped cistern. Tourists whirled up dustily for a cursory inspection—Baedeker in hand—and whirled as quickly away, bent on getting through the sights and passing on; but still Peripatetica and Jane lingered and dreamed among the ruins until Fortunato, visibly bored, suggested a short cut back to the hotel. It led them by fields of lupin, spread like crimson velvet mantles on the hillside, where the contadini cut the glowing crop, heaping it upon asses until they seemed but a moving mass of blossom trotting home on brown legs. Goats, Fortunato volunteered, detested—for some curious goatish reason he could not explain—this picturesque food, but donkeys! ah, to donkeys it was—in a burst of superlative explanation—“the donkey macaroni.”